Schools are banning Zoom because of security and privacy issues

If you have been following news for the past one week, you must be already aware of the security and privacy issues around Zoom. Yesterday, we summarized some of the key issues in an article, you can read it here.

Today, Washington Post reported that some school districts in the US have started to ban the use of Zoom for remote classrooms because of its growing security and privacy issues. The New York City Department of Education, the largest school district in the US, have ordered teachers to not use Zoom and should instead use Microsoft Teams for online classrooms. The New York City Education Department provided the following statement regarding banning of Zoom.

Providing a safe and secure remote learning experience for our students is essential, and upon further review of security concerns, schools should move away from using Zoom as soon as possible. There are many new components to remote learning, and we are making real-time decisions in the best interest of our staff and student. We will support staff and students in transitioning to different platforms such as Microsoft Teams that have the same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place.

Similarly, Clark County Public Schools in Nevada has also disabled access to Zoom for its students and teachers. Zoom has responded to the story with following statement.

Zoom takes user privacy, security, and trust extremely seriously. Zoom was originally developed for enterprise use, and has been confidently selected for complete deployment by a large number of institutions globally, following security reviews of our user, network and datacenter layers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are working around-the-clock to ensure that hospitals, universities, schools, and other organizations across the world can stay connected and operational. As more and new kinds of users start using Zoom during this time, Zoom has been proactively engaging to make sure they understand Zoom’s relevant policies, as well as the best ways to use the platform and protect their meetings.